Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about the way people search. One of our key discoveries is that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

As a result, we came up with a better, faster way to search. Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results before you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get the search results you’re looking for, faster. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful. For example, just typing [w] into the search bar will instantly generate results for ‘weather’.

Here are a few of the best features in Google Instant:

Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.

Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.

Scroll to Search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:

The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!

As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will be available for signed-in Google users in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Uganda for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8 browsers. We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!